Why Care?#29: Paolo Gaudiano - DEI Mythbusters
“Let’s not focus on just the number of representation, let’s focus on creating an environment where everyone has an equal chance to succeed, the numbers will then work themselves out. We would truly have the best people in the best positions instead of advantaged privileged white men who might have advanced in their career because of privilege they didn’t even see, and that leads to the disparities that we see.”
In Episode 29, I am joined by Paolo Gaudiano, Co-Founder and President at Aleria Research Corporation, and Chief Scientist at Aleria, to debunk the myths commonly associated with DEI. He is on a mission to help organisations become more inclusive, diverse, equitable and successful. Notwithstanding, he is Chair and co-organizer of the annual Diversity and Inclusion Research Conference, and also writes about DEI on Forbes.
Paolo shares the sophisticated simulation he has designed to capture the complex scenarios of organisational life and how bias leads to some inevitable outcomes. We explore the common DEI myths and backlash from majority groups and he explains why the support and investment of leadership is so critical to DEI success.
Paolo’s interest in DEI is evident in his career journey, which has spanned over three decades in interdisciplinary research, teaching, entrepreneurship, consulting, public speaking, and writing. Through his work, he noticed that there was a huge gap between the experiences that people described based on their diverse identities and the solutions. Paolo’s passion for DEI is based on his desire to change the way people think of DEI, quantifying the links between individual behaviour and organisational outcomes. Through his research on measuring inclusion, Paolo identified two universal themes:
· Respect or the lack thereof is by far the most common issue that causes people to feel uncomfortable and excluded at work.
· Women, in all the different types of organisations (global, domestic, small or large) feel more exclusion than men. And this leads to a greater turnover of women and a tendency to ‘truncate their career’.
Later in our discussion, he explains, the ‘zero-sum’ mindset gives rise to sentiments whereby the white majority feel that they are being pushed out. Particularly, he advises organisations to steer clear of the obsessive focus on increasing numerical representation of diverse individuals as those individuals will end up leaving when they feel excluded. Instead, there should be a focus on creating an inclusive environment where everyone has an equal chance to succeed.
On this basis, he offers advice on why leaders should treat DEI as their number one priority. As he rightly explains, leaders should focus on understanding the impact of diversifying their human assets, they should know how to optimise it to get more efficiency out of it, as they do other assets in their company, such as financial and marketing assets.
Lastly, Paolo speaks on the unique discomfort he faces when trying to balance the viewpoints of those who share similar diversity characteristics to him but have different views on DEI, to those who aren’t but are being faced with injustice. He explains trying to ensure that he addresses the issue in a way that will acknowledge the difficulties of each side, but also making them aware of the other perspective in a way that is not shaming or challenging their beliefs.
Links:
Paolo can be found on:
- LinkedIn at Paolo Gaudiano.
- Twitter at Paolo Gaudiano.
- Forbes at Paolo Gaudiano.
- TEDx: https://bit.ly/PGAUDIANO-TEDx
For more from Aleria, visit their website at: https://www.aleria.tech
For more from Aleria Research Corporation, visit their website at: https://www.aleriaresearch.org
For Paolo’s Ted Talk on ‘Quantifying which practices bring diversity in the workplace’, visit: https://youtu.be/9Ft4LGcH9cM
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Transcript
Paolo Gaudiano 00:00
So, trying to fix diversity directly is fixing the symptom. And the analogy that's helped people is that imagine that it was in the house and my wife came to me and said, Oh, honey, it's so cold. Look, the thermometer reads only 11 degrees centigrade. And I say, Oh, honey, I'll fix that and I light a match under the thermostat. And then I'll look the thermostat reads 25 degrees. Meanwhile, you know, the windows are open, the door is broken, and the roof is leaking. And when we try to staff diverse employees, especially at the entry-level, that's all you're doing, you're not fixing the problem, you're fixing the symptoms.
Nadia Nagamootoo 00:31
Hi, my name is Nadia Nagamootoo, Business psychologist, coach, speaker and founder of Avenir consulting, which creates organizational growth and success by inclusion and diversity. We've been discussing the benefits that diversity brings to a company's bottom line performance for decades with more and more evidence, but there are so many questions organizations still have about how to achieve it. How do you create a culture where people feel valued for their uniqueness and the qualities they bring? I believe it's crucial to the future success and sustainability of every organization that they find the answer to this question to make sure that each employee is not only supported but also appreciated. With this podcast, I aim to get some of the key challenges to creating inclusive workplaces out in the open and start uncovering the solutions to embracing a culture that cares for everyone. I'm going to be having conversations with some of the most inspiring people in different countries and across industries who are pushing the boundaries on inclusion and diversity in the workplace, from topics such as parenting in the workplace, ethnicity, age, gender, mental health, and all things inclusion. I want to create a movement to change society through sharing life experiences, and creating more empathy and connection. Why care? I believe that once we have organizations and societies that accept and value everyone for who they are, we become healthier, happier and better in our roles both inside and outside work.
Hello, and welcome to Episode 29 of the Why Care Podcast. My name is Nadia Nagamootoo, and I am your host. In this episode, I get to discuss all things measuring inclusion, backlash and DEI myths with the brilliant Paolo Gaudiano. Paolo is president of a non-profit research organization Ark, chief scientist of Aleria, adjunct associate professor at the NYU Stern School of Business, and chairman of the annual diversity and inclusion Research Conference. He has decades of experience in business technology and academia to transform how people think about diversity, with the ultimate goal of making our society more inclusive and equitable. Paolo is a Forbes contributor on diversity and inclusion, and is a sought after public speaker, having given hundreds of presentations in the US and abroad, including a TED talk. We discussed the science behind the simulation Paolo has developed to demonstrate the impact bias has in shaping the overall diversity of an organization and the consequences on their financial bottom line. Paolo helps unravel some of the complexities surrounding DEI by busting some myths, and using helpful analogies and stories. He offers some fascinating insights for leaders and DEI professionals. Enjoy. Paolo, it is amazing to have you on the Why Care podcast show. Thank you so much for joining me.
Paolo Gaudiano 03:19
Thank you, Nadia. It's a real pleasure to be here.
Nadia Nagamootoo 03:21
Well, I'm excited because actually, we have only communicated on LinkedIn, you were very generous with my cold message, and having never spoken to me or heard my name before and saying yes to joining me. So, I'm very excited to learn about you and all that you're doing in diversity, equity and inclusion.
Paolo Gaudiano 03:41
Well, that's very kind of you. And in fact, I'm flattered to be part of your podcast, I've seen some of the amazing participants that you've had before. So, it's quite an honor for me to be invited. Thank you so much.
Nadia Nagamootoo 03:50
Oh, no, you are part of the amazing lineup. I would love to know more about your career background, how did you end up working in this space of diversity, equity and inclusion?
Paolo Gaudiano 04:04
I pulled this off recently reflecting on that, because I jokingly tell people if you look at my background, I started out studying math and computer science. And then I did aerospace engineering, eventually fell in love with the brain and had a PhD in computational neuroscience. So, I joke with people that have done rocket science and brain surgery, and then eventually ended up in diversity, equity inclusion, which I happen to think is much harder than the first two things that I did. But something that happened to me the first time that I went to the US as a teenager on vacation. My dad was a visiting professor at UC Santa Barbara and so we spent a couple of months in a small town called Galena, right outside of Santa Barbara. I didn't speak any English, I was learning it on the street playing with people. I made friends with this young Black kid, and we would play and I picked up a little bit of English and his younger brother played with my younger brothers. And then one day a couple of weeks later, he asked me a question he said, Do you think I am a Negro, I was kinda perplexed because I came from a country where there were extremely few Black people. And the name that we used, which didn't have a negative connotation in Italy was Negro, which is very similar to Negro which is the color black. But when he asked me again, I kinda looked up and said, Yes, and he jumped on me, and he started hitting me. And then he kind of ran off. And I was like, what just happened. And when I explained it to my parents, who had lived in the United States, for a few months earlier, they knew exactly what had happened. And they went to talk to this kid's parents tried to explain the situation. But, you know, he never wanted to play with me again. And at the time, I've just thought this is very strange. And then over the years, I realized that essentially, it was my first encounter with racial contexts in the United States and the challenges of that, and also, over time came to appreciate the fact that for me, it was an uncomfortable experience that was driven by our difference in culture, the difference in our skin color, but for him, it was something that he had to face every day of his life as a Black person in America.
And that memory stayed with me and later on when eventually came back to the States to study at university, and then became essentially a full-time permanent resident, and now citizen of the United States. That memory stuck with me, and I really followed through for years. And I was very interested in diversity, equity and inclusion, but it wasn't until 2015, when I had literally a light bulb moment, I was sitting in a session, it was about how to get more women into technology, or how do we get people of color in advertising. I always went to sessions like that. And I was really struck by the stark difference between the experiences that people described, that resulted from their gender, the race, their ethnicity, their religious beliefs, on the one hand, and on the other hand, when it came to solutions, it was vague ideas, oh we got to change the hearts and minds of corporate America, we got to change our economic system, our educational system, and there was this huge gap. And then the light bulb was realizing that the work that I've been doing for almost two and a half decades has all been focused on understanding and quantifying the link between individuals and the collective. So, this could be a person working in a company, or a driver on a highway, or a soldier on a battlefield, and so on, and so forth.
And the work that I've been doing was about using computer simulations, and kind of a combination of behavioral science and computer science, to help to quantify those links. And so, I thought, wait a second, I may be able to apply this to a field that has been a personal interest of mine, because it's possible that I can use these simulations to quantify how the experiences of individuals in an organization impact not only their behaviors, or their attitudes, but ultimately how the collective behaviors of other people influence the company. And I thought, if I could prove that treating people more fairly and more equitably, will actually make the company perform better that will be a great way to convince people who look like me, you know, white male, cisgender individuals, that there is a real value in embracing DEI. And that's what happened, I literally dropped everything that I was doing, I spent about a year developing some simulations, proving to myself that it was up to something. And then the next thing you know, it was like, Okay, this is my career, this is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life.
Nadia Nagamootoo 08:16
That's an amazing story. See, what I heard is that you had this lightbulb moment of connecting the work that you were doing, in a completely different field, to diversity and inclusion, having gone to events, conferences, and listened and heard. What was it that made you go to those different events that maybe wasn't necessarily or wouldn't typically appeal to someone of your diversity characteristics, white male cisgender exactly what you just said, why did you attend?
Paolo Gaudiano 08:46
I used to say that I was passionate about diversity and inclusion, what I realized, though retrospect is that I was curious about it. I had my own experiences, as an immigrant now coming from Italy. That's hardly a disadvantage. In fact, if anything, it's even more of a bit of a privilege but I knew what it was like to feel different. You know, I have a son and a daughter. I watched my daughter, essentially, even though she was brilliant at Math and other technical fields, she really wanted to have nothing to do with spaces like that and went to finance and really found yourself incredibly uncomfortable as a woman. So, I've always been personally interested in that. I love the idea of equity. I love the idea of treating people equally, but I always saw it more as a matter of being an advocate or being some kind of an activist going out and going to different kinds of marches and things like that. And I always felt like that's not really me, that's not something that I really am contributing to tangibly. So, when I saw an opportunity to bring my work into that space, it felt like a perfect fit. It felt like a very natural thing.
Nadia Nagamootoo 09:44
Let's talk about this simulation, then. I've watched your TED talk, but for those who haven't, can you explain what is it that you've pulled together in this simulation. Describe the simulation to us and what is it that it shows?
Paolo Gaudiano 09:58
So, the idea of this simulation So this is something that I've been doing literally, my entire professional life is building simulations in which you try to capture the behaviors of individual elements and the individual elements could be a mechanical part inside a large structure. It could be a neuron inside the brain, which was what my PhD and a lot of research was about or it could be a person within a societal context, such as a company. And the idea is that we understand a lot through psychology, a lot about how people react to different circumstances and then statistically, we know things about how companies work by looking at the aggregate level. But the problem with statistics is that they hide the level of the individuals. So my former colleagues at previous companies and I as well as the work that I do now, we build computer simulations that are a little bit like a video game, like The Sims or SimCity, where you're literally replicating very simple aspects of the behavior of individuals, and how they interact with each other. And then you allow the computer simulations to play out all of these really complex scenarios, people going to work, having maybe a negative encounter, getting promoted, getting raises, dealing with a personal life in the midst of work.
These are things that would be credibly difficult to capture mathematically but when you build them into a simulation that looks like the real world, you can then analyze it the same way that you would analyze the real world. So, in the case of the simulation that you saw, we took a very simplified aim, and we said, well, what if we have a company with four layers of people from entry level, management, VPS, and executives? And you imagine that under normal circumstances, people are getting promoted on the basis of their level of seniority. So, if there is a vacancy at a certain level, you look to the level below, you look at the maybe the top 10-15%, and you choose one of them, basically, we know that it's related to seniority, but not exactly. And when you do that, you find that regardless of the personal characteristics of people in the company, you always get a fairly equal and fair advancement with the organization. And then we said, well, what happens if the company is not being inclusive by favouring men in the promotion process. So, we built a version of the simulation where you have yellow and blue people, the yellow represent women, the blue represent men, and we showed that again, normally advancement does vary even all the way through. And now we said, well, let's give the man a slight advantage in how they're likely to get promoted in each level, and when you run the simulation, you'll see that people moving around and moving up levels. And very quickly, in the equivalent of 5 to 10 years, you see a company that becomes exactly what you see in the real world, where the top echelons are dominated by men.
And then you get fewer and fewer men as you go down, until eventually at the entry level, paradoxically, you have more women than men, because the women are stuck there while their male counterparts are getting promoted. And so in that simulation, you get this visual impact of seeing what happens to people and how that shapes the overall diversity level of the company. And what's beautiful is that you can also track when people are not getting promoted, who feel that they should get promoted, how that impacts their satisfaction. And when you do that, you see that the satisfaction of the women plummets, while the satisfaction of the men stays very constant. And that reflects very much what you see in the real world where you find that women tend to have much higher turnover. And often they truncate their careers, or they switch jobs because they're not satisfied, because they see all these unfairness around them. And so those simulations are very helpful, because they help, they get to quantify that lead between what happens to individual people in your organization, and how does that shape the organization as a whole, both in terms of its diversity, and in terms of its performance.
Nadia Nagamootoo 13:42
I mean, that is genius, and fascinating. And you've opened up a whole load of questions, in my mind as a result of that. I mean, I think it's brilliant to look at an individual level and see how it impacts the system. How else then, in terms of using that stimulation within organizations, how do they benefit from seeing that stimulation and doing something different?
Paolo Gaudiano 14:09
The answer to that has actually surprised me when I discovered what came of that. What happened is that about maybe five years ago, I developed the simulation, and I was showing it to the chief diversity officer, a very large financial services company. And she looked at it and said, this is fantastic, I want you to build it for my company, I'll give you all of our diversity data, can you build a simulation for my company?, and I realized that I couldn't do that. And the reason why we couldn't do that is because knowing how many men, how many women, how many people of colour is not enough. You need to know what are the experiences that people have day to day as a function of their role, their gender, the people that work around them and how they get treated. In other words, what we realise is that we need to measure not the diversity of a company alone, but we needed to measure inclusion. By inclusion we mean specifically, the kinds of experiences that people have that lead them to feeling more satisfied, more included, a greater sense of belonging. And I want to be very careful about the word because people often when they talk about inclusion and belonging, they talk about the sense of inclusion, the sense of belonging, what we need to know is, why do you feel more inclusion? .
So, to us measuring inclusion eventually boiled down to measuring the sense of exclusion, measuring the things that happen that are different between groups of people that cause one group of people to have worse experiences than other groups, which then translates into lower performance, lower retention rates, slower advancement, and things of that sort. And so, what happened is that we were using the simulation thinking we're going to build a big strategic platform, but we ended up making a 90 degree pivot, if you will, and we developed a way of collecting exclusion data that is essentially a way of measuring inclusion kind of in reverse. And now we found that just measuring that provides tremendous insights to companies without even using the simulation. So, the simulation has become more of an educational tool, what we really do now is focused on measuring inclusion, so that we can go back to companies and say, this is exactly what has happened in your company, this is what's causing problems for different groups of people, and here's how you can address those issues.
Nadia Nagamootoo 16:22
Are you able to offer an example of an issue, something that's come up maybe thematically with a few organizations and what is it that they could do to address it, just as an example?
Paolo Gaudiano 16:36
Absolutely. One of the things that surprised us a little bit, and in retrospect, it's not that surprising is that we asked people, we go through these inclusion measurement exercises where we show the simulation, we talked about some background ideas. Then we ask people anonymously using our online platform to share experiences that have made them feel uncomfortable, not necessarily excluded, because sometimes you don't know whether something that happens is not pleasant because of your skin colour or not, or your gender, whatever the case might be. And we have a selection of what we call the categories of inclusion. There are things like work-life balance, compensation and benefits, career advancement, recognition, respect. And then we also asked them, what was the source of this uncomfortable experience? Was it your management, your leadership, was it a policy, was it your peers? So when we do that, we get this incredibly granular data, accompanied by qualitative descriptions of exactly what happens to people.
And we found a couple of things that are universal, one, respect, or the lack thereof, is by far the most common situation that causes people to feel uncomfortable at work, and this can range between very personal disrespect. I can tell you one company where we had somebody make a comment, which we always ask people if we can share comments anonymously, and we actually don't know who the people are, so we wouldn't be able to trace them anyway. But to give you an idea, we heard people say, my manager told me that I would be a happier person, if I went to the gym twice a week, or somebody else that said, Oh, that technical information would interest your boyfriend or your husband, but not you. Yes, exactly.
And you hear things like that all the time but you also hear more general senses of disrespect. Like in the United States, as you know, a couple of years ago, the administration decided that Martin Luther King Day is a National Holiday, and apparently somebody said how during a big town hall meeting of their car company, the VP said something along the lines of oh, MLK is not a real holiday, we should not take it off. So, imagine being one of the few Black people in a company like that, and hearing your VP saying that in front of the whole company, how that would make you feel. So, the number one thing that we found is that lack of respect is a major driver of the experiences people have at work.
The second thing that we found is that women in every single organization that we've looked at, and we're talking about global organizations, domestic, small, large, women always have much more exclusion, they feel much more exclusion, they experience much more exclusion than men. And the kinds of things that we see are also very common, behaviour related to meetings, both in terms of not being invited to meetings where they feel they should be invited. But also when you're in the meeting, and I'm sure this will sound familiar to you, you say something, you get interrupted by the guy next to you, or you say something, people don't understand it, the guy next to you repeats it, and they're like, oh, my gosh, you know, Paul, you're so smart.
Those kinds of things are incredibly pervasive. So some of the things that we recommend to people is say things like, Okay, if this is a problem in this area of your company, make sure that you tell the managers two things, one of them is to make a list of who should be in which meetings and every time you organize a meeting, check the box to make sure that everybody's there. And two, have someone in the meeting or ideally, you as the manager, make it your responsibility to amplify the voices of women and other members of that group. And make sure that if somebody is constantly cutting in and constantly interrupting that you politely but firmly say, hey, you've already spoken a lot, let's let somebody else have their turn. And there are many, many other examples like that, that are really intuitive. And once you see them, you're like, duh, that makes perfect sense but when you see the numbers associated with them, and you can link them to the performance of the company, it's a complete game changer, because it really shows managers why they should care about these things, and how to fix them.
Nadia Nagamootoo 20:28
Yeah, I completely get that it makes it a reality for them. It's their data from their organization, not in general, not theoretically, it's what's happening right there. I still feel and get a sense, even though some of these managers are seeing this data. Is this real? Is it really happening? You're telling me I need to look out for men maybe talking over women, offering an idea that a woman, you're saying that I've never seen it play out before? I can keep a lookout for it but honestly, it doesn't happen in my meetings. How do you navigate that?
Paolo Gaudiano 21:05
There are really two ways of addressing that question. One of them is that we came up with an interesting analogy, we tell people that inclusion is invisible and the way that we argue that is by bringing up the analogy with health. When you meet somebody, you don't say hi I’m Paolo and I’m healthy today but if I happen to have a cough, or if my voice is hoarse, because I hadn't been sick, or if I had a cast or something, the conversation of my lack of health would come up. So, we don't notice when we're healthy, we notice when we’re unhealthy. Similarly, we don't notice when we're being included, we notice when we're excluded. Now, what does that mean? If I'm a healthy person, and I go to the doctor and they told me about different diseases, I don't really understand diseases, because I've never had them, I don't experience that. Similarly, if you are a very included person, that exclusion is completely invisible to you. Which means that the most included people in the organization are the ones that are least familiar with, at least likely to ever experience or believe that these kinds of things actually happen in their companies.
One of the beauties about doing work the way that we do it is that it's different than let's say doing focus groups and having a group of people complain about something, because then you can always say, oh, they're complaining because of this, and that. When we do measurement across the whole company, and you compare the results for men versus women, or for white people versus people of colour, it is black and white, you absolutely cannot lie, you cannot say, oh, wait a second, maybe this is just a fluke. And I can tell you that I've had at least two occasions, I've had white male leaders to whom we presented the results behind closed doors, who literally broke down and cried and said, I cannot believe this stuff is happening in my company. And so that's really the first aspect of it. But the second aspect of this is where linking it to KPIs and company performance is so crucial. Because if I show you a simulation, or even without a simulation, if I say look, in your organization, these things are happening to the women more so than to the men, and then you look at your organization, and you find that your retention rate for women is 10% lower than it is for men.
And you know how much it costs you to replace a worker at different levels, you can literally put dollars and cents or euros or pounds and pence into an equation and say, Oh, the fact that I am being twice as exclusive toward women, as I am toward men is costing me a million pounds a year, that's when it becomes really tangible. So, it's the combination of make them aware that they don't see exclusion, but that does not mean that it's not there, so it’s quantifying the existence of exclusion to their organization, and that tying it to the performance of their business. You said something very interesting before, right? You hinted at the fact that a lot of the arguments for diversity and inclusion are based on these statistical, ‘Oh, on average, companies that are more diverse perform better’. But leaders don't run their companies based on statistics, they run their companies based on what they can do for their organization. And that's really what's kind of revolutionary about what we do is that we tell them how to fix things and the impact that not fixing things is having on their organization.
Nadia Nagamootoo 24:18
Yeah, it hits to the point to all those leaders who are sitting there going, I don't see it, and why do we need to do anything differently, we're a successful organization. And it really gets to the bottom line. This is what women are experiencing, or this is what your ethnic minority individuals are experiencing or whoever and you can see in the statistics, what's happening in terms of your fallout for those people. So, in your Forbes articles, you speak a lot about the complexities of diversity and inclusion, a lot about them. And that's sort of at the heart of what you talk about. I love that because actually when we're trying to navigate those complexity, I come up against them all the time in my work with particularly male leaders and white leaders and heterosexual leaders, those who fit into what seemingly is the majority characteristic in most organizations, feeling like, I don't get it. Now basically being me, is a detriment to my career progression, there's nothing for men in the organization, I see all of these positive action programs, and I don't trust if I go for a promotion, or if I go for a job, that they're going to choose me, because I know that they're hoping to get their diversity statistics up. How do we navigate that complexity?
Paolo Gaudiano 25:36
Yeah, that's a real challenging problem and we're seeing a lot more of that. I think that after the big wave of increased interest in DEI, in the last couple of years, since the murder of George Floyd and the pandemic, and everything that happened, we're now starting to see a lot of retrenchment and backlash. I think there is, again, a couple of different ways of thinking about it. A fundamental point that I make in all my writing, and always speaking, is the fact that focusing on diversity, and specifically focusing on numerical representation alone is a mistake. Because first of all, diversity, it takes a very long time and a lot of turnovers, before you can significantly impact diversity, diversity, really, to me is an outcome. It's the result of everything that you do, not only who you recruit, but also how you treat the people that you recruited, how much effort you put into their education, their growth, their advancement, etc. So, focusing on diversity alone is a mistake. And one of the reasons why it's a mistake is because it gives rise to exactly the kind of sentiment that you're describing. It's that zero-sum game mindset. If you're going to double the number of Black people, then immediately go to reduce the number of White people, which if it's a closed system, it's true, you can't avoid that. Instead, what we try to point out to people is that, yes, there are a lot of inequities. It's completely unfair, the fact that there are so few women in leadership roles, so few people of colour in leadership roles, but really, the point is that you need to create a more inclusive organization. And by creating a more inclusive organization, you create a more high-performing organization that will attract naturally more diverse talent, of course, you still have to make efforts to recruit etc. When you talk to people about making efforts to be more inclusive, as opposed to making efforts to increase the number of a particular group, you're taking away that sense of oh, well, because I'm not Black, because I'm not a woman, because I don't have a disability, I'm now disadvantaged. The reality is that when people ask me those questions, in a conference, for example, it's very awkward, because you know, you want to say, oh, come on, you're being an idiot, look at the data. You want to say that but the problem is that if that person is asking a question, half of the room is thinking it. So now you have a lot of people that are thinking, this guy's an idiot, and a lot of people that are thinking this guy's great, he's asking exactly what I'm thinking about. And so, walking that fine line is, I have to say one of the most uncomfortable things that has happened to me, and I know that's one of the things that you'd like to talk about, it is discomfort, right. And so, you have to acknowledge that for a single individual being told by their manager that their promotion has been delayed, because they need to introduce more black people, to them, it stinks, it's unpleasant. But the fault is not that the guy is a jerk, the fault is that the organization should never create an environment in which you are told that your position or your promotion is being delayed because they are trying to hire a Black person. If instead, the organization looked at their numbers and said, look of the last 50 people that were promoted, we have found that the vast majority were white men, and only a tiny percentage of our existing women and people of colour were promoted, it means that there's something that we're doing that is wrong, it means that somehow our processes have biases, or they're allowing biases to creep in that they shouldn't. So, to me, a huge part of answering the question is to sidestep it by saying, look, let's not focus too much just on the numbers and representation, let's focus on creating an environment where everybody has an equal chance to succeed and I guarantee you that the numbers will then work themselves out. And we will truly have the best people in the best positions instead of having advantaged, privileged, often White men who might have advanced in their career because of privilege that they did not even see and that leads to the disparities that we see.
Nadia Nagamootoo 29:31
And that's the hardest part, isn't it, exactly what you've just said, privileges that they did not see. And you were talking about the absence of exclusion before, so we don't really see inclusion when we feel excluded. And it's the same with privilege, isn't it? So, we don't see the privilege that we have. And so therefore, if we have a manager or recruiting manager that is saying, we just need to pause for a moment because we need to see more people of colour or ethnic minority individuals and then someone of an ethnic minority background gets the job. It on the surface seems incredibly unfair and unjust because if you fundamentally believe that the system was fair and just in the first place, then it seems like we're skewing the process now. That's the issue, isn't it?
Paolo Gaudiano 30:21
Exactly, you're spot on. It's the fact that we do not notice. If one day we get a promotion, we may not realise that there was a peer of ours who happened to be a woman, or Black, who didn't get promoted, who maybe had slightly better qualifications than we did, we don't see that we just say, oh, hey, I got promoted, I deserve to get promoted. But if somebody points out that, ‘oh, we're going to promote that person, because he's Black’, you're doing a disservice both to me, and to that person, because now they have the stigma where they're considered, the diversity promotion or the diversity hire. So again, that's one of the many reasons why I argue very strongly that this obsessive focus on diversity alone., We talk about diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, but 99% of the data, and 99% of the initiatives are only focused on that D, and that's a terrible mistake, we really need to focus much more on the I on the E on all of the pieces. One of the ways that I like to summarize diversity, equity inclusion, to me, inclusion is what you do. Equity is what you aspire to. And diversity is what you get. It's very simple. Diversity is just a snapshot of who is in your company today. And if I may tell you kind of a funny analogy, as you might tell, I like analogies. I give people another analogy. When we talk about diversity very often, the thing that we will focus on is hiring, I’m just going to hire more diverse people. But if you hire people from a different background who then come in to your company and they're uncomfortable, their manager doesn't treat them well, and they feel segregated and not treated well, they will leave right, so it can backfire. And trying to fix diversity directly is fixing the symptom. And the analogy that's helped people is that imagine that I was in the house and my wife came to me and said, Oh, honey, it's so cool, look, the thermometer reads only 11 degrees centigrade. And I say, Oh, honey, I'll fix that and I light a match under the thermostat, and now look, the thermostat reads 25 degrees. Meanwhile, you know, the windows are open, the door is broken, and the roof is leaking. And when we try to stuff diverse employees, especially at the entry-level, that's all you're doing, you're not fixing the problem, you're fixing the symptom.
Nadia Nagamootoo 32:36
That's a brilliant analogy it is exactly right. And what you've just said really resonates with me and I hear a lot about the conversation, when I'm trying to talk about inclusion and creating an inclusive culture, supporting leaders on what it means to lead inclusively so that teams feel and experience inclusion, often I hear the issue is less about the organization. And what we hear is that we can't get women in, the industry itself lacks women. So how are we meant to get the women in if they're not there in the first place?
Paolo Gaudiano 33:15
So, one of the many talks that I like to give regularly, there is one that I call DEI MythBusters. And I debunk a lot of these kinds of myths, and the pipeline problem was one of them. And what I find stunning about that argument is that first of all, a company is not an open field that people just randomly walk through. It's like, oh, well, look, there is only 12% women with engineering degrees. And so how can we have more than 12% women in our engineering departments? And then of course, you have 6% anyway to begin with. But I think, look, if you're building a product, and you need a certain part, and it needs to be high quality, are you going to look around and say, well, you know, the average quality of this part is really mediocre, so I'm going to settle for a mediocre part. I mean, the idea that somehow the number of people out there is a driver of who we're gonna get, it's a form of laziness. And one thing that I tell people is when I created Aleria, and it was a solopreneur, and I wanted to build a team, my first big hire that I wanted to have, I had already hired one of the person, but I needed to hire a technical product manager, and those roles are typically dominated by men. I did not want a man because I knew that it was important for me to get diversity within my own organization. So, what did I do? I reached out to some women that I knew I asked them where they looked for jobs. I did an internet search on women, technology jobs, etc. I got 86 resumes, And 82 of them were for women. I hired one of the women, Lisa Russell, who's now the CEO of Aleria. She's an absolute kick ass incredible woman. And I'm grateful that I found her, and it took me a little bit of effort. But I mean, come on. I got 82 out of 86 resumes, which were from women, and I guarantee you that that's not the ratio of men to women in the technical product manager field. So really when people talk about the pipeline problem with all due respect, it's just a silly excuse. There is no excuse for it.
Nadia Nagamootoo 35:05
I am totally with you. And that's one thing that I do offer to them in the politest way, where is it that you're fishing for these people? If you're going and fishing in the same pond, you're going to get the same type of fish. I would love to talk to you about DEI readiness. Because you mentioned that Aleria I know is all about measuring inclusion data metrics. What do you call DEI readiness? Is it about organizational maturity? Is it about where an organization needs to be in order to be able to be more inclusive?
Paolo Gaudiano 35:43
The single most important element of the success of an organization in terms of DEI is to have full support of the leadership. And to me, the level of DEI readiness really is reflected first and foremost, in how genuinely willing the leadership is to make the effort that is needed and the investment that is needed to embrace DEI throughout your organization. Now, one of the things that I've realized is that if you frame it in terms of lofty goals of equality, and targets that seem incredibly difficult to reach, and the business case, or based on statistical data over hundreds of companies, I find that unfortunately, a lot of those arguments fail to link directly to how do I make my organization and why should I do that. So, if I may, I would like to give you what I call my minute and a half compelling argument for why every leader of every organization should treat DEI as their number one strategy. And it goes like this. First, if you think of your people as an asset, just like any asset of a company, you have financial assets, you have marketing assets, you have inventory, you have products, right. For all of those other areas, we have tools to help us diversify our assets. So, you have portfolio management for financial assets, we have programmatic for advertising, you have optimization of diversification of your products of your inventory, etc. For people, we don't have that. If I give you a magic wand, then you can magically change half of the men in your company to women and ask you how will that impact your performance? You have no way of estimating that. So, the first part of the argument is, why don’t we focus on understanding the impact of diversifying your human assets. But then the second part comes by pointing out the value of those human assets. And I found data only for the United States, but I believe this is true, fairly globally, in the United States, in 2018, every single company across the entire country across every advertising channel spent the grand total of $250 billion. That's a lot of money. When you take all companies in United States, same market, and you look at how much money they spent on payroll, they spent $7.4 trillion on payroll, 30 times as much as advertising. So, here's my question to every leader of every organization, you have an asset that on average cost you between 10 and 50 times more than your advertising and you don't know how to optimize it, you don't know how to diversify it to get more efficiency out of it. To me, that's abysmal failure of leadership, period understory. If you have 50 people working in your marketing and advertising department, you should have 1500 people, 30 times as many people working to ensure that your human assets are maximized, that they're happier, that they're productive, that they're satisfied that they're not turning over. I'm not saying that absolutely everybody has to have a certain percent of the people or whatever. But I'm saying that if you're not focused on your personnel, on your people, you're failing. And if somebody figures out how to optimize that, within any specification, they will absolutely dominate the marketplace.
Nadia Nagamootoo 39:06
That's brilliant, and really speaks to the importance of leadership in an organization and then we’re getting it all, understanding it or putting energy into it, but not just because it's the right thing to do but because they really, really understand the impact and the importance of the impact of inclusion on their people and on their business. We swiftly come to the end of our conversation. I can't actually believe how quickly that's gone on. I've still got loads I would love to ask you. But let's come to this question that I have around discomfort. So, as you know, I'm writing a book called Beyond Discomfort and it's around how inclusive leadership is so hard. And I'm asking all of my guests, what is the discomfort that you've had to navigate, that actually by leaning into that discomfort and understanding that discomfort and allowing it to be has allowed you to be a better inclusive leader.
Paolo Gaudiano 40:08
Well, I would say in my line of work, and there's certainly been personal situations in which in my interactions with colleagues and partners, etc, there have been times where there had been some discomfort because of racial, gender, age sensitivities. But I think the true discomfort for me, and I already hinted at this in an earlier answer is being in an audience where somebody will stand up. I had my first experience when I was speaking with a group of maybe a couple 100 women, and there were few men in the audience. And at the end of the presentation, one man turned on his mic, this was on Zoom, and he asked the question, he said, something along the lines of, well, let's face it, you know, first, it was diversity, now it's diversity and inclusion, the reality is that a lot of talented men are sitting by the sidelines, because women are being hired in their place. And when you first get asked a question like that in front of an audience, and I mentioned before, it's that struggle of, Oh, my God, you know, my first instinct was that I want to tell the guy seriously, look at the data, come on, you can't be serious about it, but you realise that these people see things that impact them directly and you cannot deny that. Denying somebody's experience would be exactly the same mistake that a lot of white people do to people of colour, and that a lot of men do women. So, you don't want to do that. But what that highlighted for me is that unique discomfort of being truly an interface between two very, very different groups of people, the people who look like me, the people who have the same background that I have, who have certain beliefs, who have certain views about DEI, even though they may not actually be expressing them openly. And then the people who do not look like me who have experiences like yourself, I'm sure that make them feel the injustice to make them experience these things, and the difficulty of understanding both sides. Now, I will never know what it's like to be a woman or to be gay, or to have a permanent disability or to be Black, I can educate myself about it, I can surround myself with people who can help me to understand that. So, when I find myself in between, that's without question, the greatest discomfort that I have. It's seeing both viewpoints, seeing what elements of both viewpoints are reasonable from their perspectives and seeing which ones are perhaps less reasonable. And then trying to answer those kinds of questions or address those kinds of issues in a way that will acknowledge the difficulties that each side is having, but also make them aware of the other side in a way that is not about guilt, and it's not about shaming people, it's not about challenging their beliefs. I would say that's probably the most awkward thing. You mentioned an article that I wrote, that article that I wrote about how to respond to questions like that was without question, the most difficult article I had to write because I felt that I was walking on eggshells and I felt that I had to write it super carefully, so that it would appeal to everybody regardless of where they come from.
Nadia Nagamootoo 43:03
And I hear that, because that's exactly the line that I'm walking when I'm writing this book. So, I’ll be tapping on your shoulder a few times, maybe just so you could help me navigate that fine line, because you did it incredibly well in that Forbes article. And we'll share the link to your Forbes articles and TED talk on the show notes page. Paulo, it has been such a pleasure to get to know you and hear about your just brilliant and creation of the simulations and how you're creating that business case that makes sense to leaders who are taking ownership of creating inclusion, and shifting that focus from the D to the I in the hope of the E. And I love that I love everything that you're doing at Aleria. Thank you so much for your time.
Paolo Gaudiano 43:53
Well, Nadia, thank you and being one of the few people that I've ever run across who's actually doing meaningful work in inclusion, with your work at Avenir. And the book that you're writing, I think your work you do is exceptional. So again, it's a real honour for me to be part of this.
Nadia Nagamootoo 44:06
Thank you. And if people did want to get in touch with you, are you on social channels?
Paolo Gaudiano 44:11
My primary social channel right now is LinkedIn. I have a Twitter account, but I'm not very active on it. But LinkedIn is the best way to get a hold of me. And as you pointed out, I have a Forbes blog which I write regularly, I've written over 100 pieces in that blog. So those are probably the two best ways to find out more about work.
Nadia Nagamootoo 44:28
Excellent. An absolute pleasure, Paolo. Please be well, and I'll catch up with you soon.
Paolo Gaudiano 44:34
Likewise, thank you again, Nadia. Take care.
Nadia Nagamootoo 44:37
That concludes Episode 29 of the Why care podcast. Paolo offered some great analogies there, which I found incredibly helpful in explaining the cynicism and backlash surrounding DEI. It was also valuable to get his perspective on how we can focus more on inclusion rather than diversity. Do let Paolo and I know what you thought of today's show. You can find me on LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter with the handle Nadia Nagamootoo. As always, I really appreciate your support of this podcast through leaving a review on whatever platform you're listening and spreading the word by sharing it with your friends and family. Huge thanks to Mauro Kenji for editing this podcast and Glory Olubori for supporting the show notes and getting it out there on social media.
